I am a full-time professional blogger who spends many hours a week consuming and producing personal finance content. My academic background is not in personal finance (B.S. Computer Science & Economics, M.S. Software Engineering, & an MBA) but I do have the rare opportunity to interact with people interested in personal finance on a daily basis (this site gets gets over half a million unique visitors a month). This site has given me a good perspective on how the effects of money, having it and not having it, has on people’s lives. Whether it’s figuring out how to budget for the first time or where you should be investing your 401(k), readers come to Bargaineering because I am able to explain personal finance in everyday terms they can understand.

I have had the pleasure of appearing in numerous media publications and radio broadcasts to bring a “regular person’s” perspective, to bring insight into a complicated process, or to provide a look at what concerns the typical personal finance blog visitor. If you would like to contact me, even if only for an informal chat, please send me an email and I’ll respond within a few hours. I am located between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, MD.

Print Media Appearances

Jim headlines this article about blogging and transparency in the personal finance niche. He discusses the idea of openly sharing various parts of his financial life including his budget, his net worth, and how much he paid for his car.

“Jim Wang, for instance, loves his credit cards. The entrepreneur from Columbia, Md., writes about personal finance at Bargaineering.com. He controls his credit cards instead of letting them control him.

‘I carry three cards,’ he says. ‘They’re all cash-back or rewards cards. One card’s for business; one offers rewards at restaurants, movie theaters and bookstores; and one offers cash back on everything else.’”

Jim is quoted in a story sharing his father’s advice. “‘Save for your future.’ This is difficult for new grads, who often feel retirement is a lifetime away. “One thing my dad impressed on me was that I shouldn’t waste my money on the latest gadget or gizmo; that I should save it so I could benefit from compounding returns,” said Jim Wang, creator of a personal finance blog at Bargaineering.com.”

“Jim Wang, founder of the website www.bargaineering.com, found himself paying the so-called marriage penalty after marrying his wife who worked in biomedical engineering at the time. Wang … says part of the couple’s income got bumped into a higher tax bracket–so instead of paying a 28 percent rate, they were suddenly paying 33 percent.”

Unlike some blogging peers, Wang wasn’t mired in debt and didn’t grow up in a household clueless about money. (His father persuaded him to open a Roth IRA when Wang was a teen.) He started the blog to learn about finances. His blog “follows the things that I do in my life,” he says. So lessons he learned buying a house and getting married are blog fodder.

Jim is quoted in a story about calculating the value of the things you buy by tracking each time you use it. “‘Tracking or estimating use is the best first step,’ said Jim Wang, creator of personal finance site Bargaineering.com. It ‘puts hard numbers to something that’s qualitative in your mind.’”

“When Jim Wang, 28, the Columbia, Md.-based author of the Bargaineering blog, … didn’t earn much money during the first two years of his blog. But now it gets around 850,000 page views a month, and he turns those eyeballs into $10,000 a month.”

“According to Jim Wang, personal finance blogger at Bargaineering.com, this may be a lot of fuss over nothing: ‘I see this a lot, especially with the recession, and it doesn’t affect me at all. Stores need to protect their margins and this is just one of the ways they can prevent credit card transaction fees from eating into their profits.’”

“With the installment agreement, you are requesting that you be given essentially a loan from the IRS to pay back the taxes owed over a period of three years or less. Fill out IRS Form 9465 and the IRS will respond in about 30 days,” says Columbia-based personal finance blogger Jim Wang on his Web site, bargaineering.com.

“Jim Wang, founder of the personal finance blog Bargaineering.com, recommended that I take a look at reward interest checking accounts. ‘They come from local community banks and credit unions and offer rates higher than CDs but offer more flexibility than CDs,’ Wang said.”

Jim shares some of his money saving tips with the Baltimore Sun’s Eileen Ambrose including a leftover calendar to help reduce spoilage and the “hidden” benefits of some credit cards from extra warranty coverage to price protection.

Bargaineering (formerly Blueprint for Financial Prosperity) is featured in a discussion about snowflaking, the idea that small irregular payments (in addition to regular payments) can help rapidly reduce debt.

Jim discusses the topics that have been capturing the attention of the personal finance blogosphere, like the $700 billion bailout package, as well as recent topics, such as diversifying your savings across multiple banks and staying under the FDIC insurance limit.